Category: travel photography

Off to the Netherlands

May 9, 2024 • 12:02 pm

On Saturday I’m leaving for Amsterdam for eight days, at least two of which will be devoted to work (a lecture on science and religion on May 16 at Tilburg University and, the next day, a group discussion of ideology’s incursion into science at the Science Department at the University of Amsterdam). There may be interviews or podcasts, but I don’t yet know.

This means that posting will be very light during that time, as not only do I have work, but I want to see more of this beautiful city. Of course I have to return to the Van Gogh Museum, but will ferret out other things to do.  I will post as often as time permits.

Please keep emails to me to a minimum during this period, and please don’t send readers’ wildlife, as it may get lost.  Matthew will be putting up the Hili Dialogue every day, and, as always, I’ll do my best.

In honor of this trip, here’s an old song that nobody but me recalls:

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 3, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today’s photos come from reader and UK resident Stephen Warren, and includes, arguagly, what is the world’s tallest waterfall.  Stephen’s photos are indented, and you can enlarge them by clicking on them.

Tugela Falls via the chainladders

Tugela Falls is a stream that plunges over the Amphitheatre escarpment in the Drakensberg mountains, located in South Africa just to the East of the border with Lesotho. It is usually listed as the second tallest waterfall in the world in terms of total drop, after Angel Falls in Venezuela, which also holds the record for the greatest single drop. However as noted here, recent measurements indicate that Tulgela Falls may actually be taller than Angel Falls for total drop.

The Amphitheatre is an escarpment 5km long with a cliff some 4000 ft high over much of its length followed by a more gentle descent into the valley. As you can see, and some may remember, it was used as the backdrop to the film “Zulu”, which depicted the battle of Rorke’s Drift. That’s not unreasonable because Rorke’s Drift (and Isandlwana) is only 60 miles away. The big knob on the right hand side is the Sentinel and the walk cuts across the bottom and reaches the plateau at the top, at 9700 ft elevation. from the RH side.

We stayed at the Witsieshoek Mountain Lodge, which on a good day has a spectacular view of the Amphitheatre, but the weather was cloudy for much of our visit, and I have had to string together the best pics taken at different times They are a bit mediocre, but I think convey the thrill of the walk. Here is the view from the Lodge. The lodge is near the town of Phuthaditjhaba, formerly named Witsieshoek:

The lodge was built to facilitate the hike to the top of Tugela Falls, although there are many alternative attractive hikes to try. The route starts at the Sentinel car park, at 8200 ft elevation, and involves a fairly easy climb of some 1500 ft, until you get to the exhilarating chainladders. These involve two vertical pitches of some 80ft and 50ft. You need a cool head for these, particularly the first one, although everyone I spoke to who had done the walk insisted they found it terribly easy!

The Lodge provide a lift to the Sentinel car park in a 4WD. The road is in terrible shape and it was a very uncomfortable ride. Here is the start of the walk, looking up to the Sentinel. I did the walk with my son George, who you will see in some of the pictures:

I was surprised to see native flowers on the route that I have in my garden. This is a Nerine:

This, I think, is an Osteospermum:

. . . and this is a Lobelia:

On the drive from Bloemfontein to the lodge (4.5h) we frequently saw Cosmos in the fields. So I checked, and Cosmos is in fact native to the Americas, and it came to South Africa in contaminated horsefeed in the 2nd Boer War.The first part of the walk was paved, but once we got into the rocky parts it was still never hard going, and we didn’t suffer from the elevation either. We eventually reached the chainladders, by which time we were in the clouds. Here is a view from the bottom of the first pitch (this was actually taken on the way down),

. . . and then a picture take from the top of the first pitch.

The top is a plateau, and it is a gentle 25min walk over to the top of Tugela Falls. The stream is only small:

Finally, my son George at the top of (probably) the tallest waterfall in the world, but we couldn’t see much of it:

Here is a great picture from the Tugela Falls wiki page to get a better idea:

Juniper339, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We did the whole walk in 4.5h, up and down.

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 21, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today’s photos come from ecologist Susan Harrison at UC Davis. Her captions and notes are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

“The Birds” at Bodega Bay, California

Today’s post has only a few actual birds, and is more about the greatest-ever avian-themed horror movie:  Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” filmed at Bodega Bay, California and released in 1963. Most readers probably know this, but here’s a plot summary:  A wealthy San Francisco woman, Melanie, becomes obsessed with a man named Mitch and pursues him to his family ranch at Bodega Bay, bearing caged lovebirds as a gift. The local seagulls and crows become demonically possessed, attacking first Melanie and then the townspeople.  Terror, death and an exploding gas station ensue.

On a recent visit to the University of California’s Bodega Marine Lab, with the weather too windy for much wildlife photography, I took some photos along the tourist trail to “The Birds” locations.

Here’s the town of Bodega Bay, showing the sport-fishing docks where Melanie rents a skiff to motor across the harbor with the lovebirds:

The town sits on Bodega Harbor, on the left (north) side of this photo.  The bay proper is on the right (south), separated from the harbor by the long peninsula known as Doran Beach:

The fishing pier in the movie is gone, but here’s a neighboring one of similar vintage:

The ranch house to which Melanie travels seeking Mitch was built for the movie on a property called the Gaffney Ranch.  The landowner, Rose Gaffney, led a successful fight to stop construction of a nuclear reactor at Bodega Head and her land later became the Bodega Marine Laboratory and a marine conservation area.  Mitch’s house site is now the marine lab’s dorm complex.  Here’s an aerial view of the lab with Bodega Harbor behind it (from Coastview.org):

Here the lab is just visible behind the rugged cliffs of Bodega Head.  What a place for a nuclear reactor, right where the San Andreas Fault meets the sea!:

The Tides Restaurant was a key location in the movie and remains a mecca for Birds-related tourism:

Today’s Tides Restaurant scarcely resembles the movie’s charming little roadhouse, which burned down in 1968:

Tippi Hedren, who starred as Melanie, made annual publicity visits to The Tides until at least 1995. The restaurant’s memorabilia includes autographs by Hedren and co-star Suzanne Pleshette, who played Annie, schoolteacher and ex-girlfriend of Mitch:

Tippi Hedren suffered much abuse from Hitchcock during and after the filming of The Birds, and her career stalled after she stopped putting up with him.  Her iconic look as Melanie inspired a themed Barbie doll, one of which sits on a shelf at the marine lab:

At the Potter School, Annie’s schoolkids were terrorized by crows and seagulls thanks to a visit from Melanie.  The real school was built in 1873 and had just been condemned when Hitchcock’s crew came scouting.  The Church of St. Teresa of Avila also appeared in the movie:

Finally, here are the most sinister-looking birds I could find on my visit.

Seagulls (Western Gull, Larus occidentalis and/or California Gull, Larus californicus), playing all innocent around a tidepool:

Snowy Plovers (Anarhynchus nivosus) looking like they just murdered someone and aren’t talking:

Common Loon (Gavia immer) with devilish eyes:

Red-breasted Merganser (Mergus serrator) looking like a mascara’d goth:

Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) in noir-ish sunset lighting:

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 12, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today we finish off Athayde Tonhasca Júnior’s recent trip to Venice (the first part is here). His notes are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

One of the history’s delights is the opportunity to pull a thread of successive events that help us understand better today’s world. These fabulous bronze horses inside St Mark’s Basilica (the ones on the facade are replicas) were pilfered from Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, when the city was sacked by Frank crusaders and Venetians in 1204. The Fourth Crusade was kicked off by Pope Innocent III – an ironic name if ever there was one – who had no idea of the shitstorm he was unleashing. Despite his angry threats of excommunication, the Crusaders, who were supposed to go to Jerusalem, stormed Constantinople and massacred their Christian brethren in an orgy of rape, disembowelments and decapitations. The city was razed to the ground and the Byzantine Empire never recovered, becoming easy pickings for the invading Ottomans in 1453. For a cut of the profits, the Venetians provided transport and gave all the logistical support to Innocent’s road trip from hell – so you could say they are largely responsible for Constantinople becoming Istanbul. Incidentally, the Venetians had the perfect leader for this rapacious adventure: the nonagenarian and blind Doge Enrico Dandolo (you can read the details in Roger Crowley’s City of Fortune, an excellent account of Venice’s history). To this day, the Fourth Crusade is a sore subject for Orthodox Christians:

Another souvenir pinched from Constantinople: The Four Tetrarchs, probably depicting the four rulers that took over the Roman Empire in 293 AD. The Byzantines considered themselves Greek-speaking Romans (Romaioi), so Rome’s past was their past. Notice the mismatched foot in one of the figures; the original bit broke off when the statue was hacked away. The heel of the missing foot was discovered in 1960, and it’s on display in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum:

Some armies would go to war with their dull and ugly artillery pieces. Not the dazzling Venetians, as attested by this 1643 culverin (an early type of cannon).

The End. These pens in the Naval Museum were used by Napoleon Bonaparte to sign the treaty of Campo Formio on 17 October 1797, thus ending five years of war between the French Republic and the First Coalition. France and Austria swapped several bits of territory, redrawing the map of Europe. In the process, Venice was swallowed by Austria. After 1,100 years, La Serenissima was no more:

Venice’s resident population dropped below 50,000 in 2022, down from 66,000 20 years ago and 175,000 in the 1950s. Locals are leaving, fed up with mass tourism and the cost of living. But there’s plenty of old Venice still left:

Rotund tourists may struggle in a calle stretta (a narrow alley; calle Varisco is 53 cm wide). These alleys branch out in every direction and don’t lead you to any specific place; they are used by residents to get home. Many of these thoroughfares are not on the maps and are beyond phone signal reach, so good luck finding your way. While you wander around baffled and disorientated, stay on good terms with the natives by keeping to the right and in a single queue:

A helpful but scarce street sign: ‘the whores’ gate’, where presumedly clients were serviced while standing up against the calle‘s walls:

Venice’s historic centre comprises 121 islands linked by 435 bridges. Shopping, public transport, ambulances, rubbish collection, home delivery, postal service and everything else depend on the canals network:

Having a go at describing our wine during a midday victualling: meandering, medium-bodied, bordering on the reckless at the quantum level. Hints of peach-pits, boysenberries and biodynamic hand-cultivated cacao from a coastal Tuscan villa; cleansing, metallic tannin waltzing with sweet-sour rosehip and balsamic vinegar; co-habiting with sumptuousness that does not bully a goat spleen escabeche. An approachable companion for self-medication any time of day (h/t many sources). Ok, I was a little off. Some wine people must have great fun composing these pretentious servings of tripe. In rural Italy, you can’t go wrong by ordering description-free vino della casa (house wine). It may come in a faceless bottle or jug but is invariably good. No respectable restaurant will risk its reputation with the locals – never mind tourists passing by – by offering plonk. That principle doesn’t apply to big cities:

  You can eat well and not be ripped off in Venice – or anywhere else. Stay clear of tourist hangouts, bypass the dreadful menù fisso (fixed price but little choice) and don’t trust reviews – most of them are written by people used to overcooked pasta and abominations such as pineapple pizzas and spaghetti Bolognese. Instead, follow the locals. We had two excellent meals in this unassuming osteria, which is patronised by neighbours and vaporetto (public waterbus) workers.

The superb Renaissance-kitsch Torre dell’Orologio (Clock Tower), built in 1496/1497. The two bronze figures on top are hinged at the waist to strike the bell on the hour. They are supposed to be shepherds, but are known colloquially and politically-incorrectly (Italians are not oversensitive about these matters) as ‘the Moors’ because of their dark patina. Below them is the winged lion of St. Mark, followed by Virgin Mary with her offspring flanked by two blue panels: the left shows the time in Roman numerals, while the right indicates 5-min intervals in Arabic numerals. Finally, the clock, displaying the time, the phase of the moon, and the dominant sign of the Zodiac. The clock’s mechanism beats any Casio: it has been working since 1753:

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 7, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today we have travel photos from a recent trip to Venice by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior.  This is the first of a two-part series; Athayde’s commentary is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The likes of Google, Amazon, Telsa or their forebears such as the East Indian Company epitomise hardcore capitalism, behemoths with the unwavering goal of maximising profit. But these modern and past corporations are dabblers when measured up against La Serenissima, or ‘The most serene’ Venetian Republic.

When waves of invading Germanic tribes started to pull the Roman Empire apart, some sensible citizens decided to make themselves scarce. They found safety in the marshy islands of the Venetian lagoon, places that are difficult to reach, easy to defend and not particularly coveted by Teutonic barbarians.

Starting with a scattering of fishermen’s huts, Venice expanded into a magnificent city built on oak and larch poles sunk in the lagoon. These foundations of houses, palaces and churches have lasted for over a thousand years thanks to a fortuitous combination: the lagoon’s oxygen-starved waters curtail decomposition, and the high concentration of silt petrified the poles. You can say that Venice is a city on stilts.

From the salt trade, the City-state of Venice diversified and grew by selling Slavic captives (if you ever wondered where the word ‘slave’ came from. . . ), silk, glass and, by far the most profitable commodities, spices. Aided by a powerful navy, by the year 1000 Venice came to dominate Mediterranean trade from Asia and Africa to Europe, gobbling up big chunks of territory along the way. You will find the lion of St. Mark, Venice’s symbol of power, decorating buildings and monuments all over Cyprus, Crete, and the Balkan states.

The Republic of Venice was nominally ruled by a Doge (from the Latin dux), but the real authority emanated from the richest merchants and aristocrats who formed the city’s parliament, or the Great Council of Venice. In any case, the Doge was a symbol of Venice’s might, so pomp and circumstance were a must. No gondola was dignified enough for His Serenity during the Ascension Day festivities, so he would go out sitting pretty on the stern of a flamboyant gilded barge known as bucintoro (bucentaur). This 1828 model in the Naval Museum depicts the last bucentaur, which was 35 m long and propelled by 42 oars, each manned by four men. In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, the vengeful warmonger, ordered the bucentaur to be set alight so that French soldiers could recover the gold.

Venice become the richest city in Europe, and its fabulously wealthy merchants were equivalent to today’s Russian oligarchs. Except they had good taste and patronised the arts and science. This is the ceiling of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, a museum of cringe-making medical instruments and books written by the likes of Galen and Hippocrates. Almost no tourists in sight.

One of the Scuola Grande‘s treasures: Historia Plantarum, also known as the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a natural history encyclopaedia. This famous codex, dating back to the fourteenth century, contains illustrations of plants and animals with curative properties.

Venice overwhelms the visual senses: everywhere you look is covered by painstakingly created details. Each column surrounding the Palazzo Ducale (the Doge’s palace) is uniquely carved; no mass-produced mouldings here.

Basilica Cattedrale Patriarcale di San Marco (St Mark’s Basilica).

If you want to explore Venice at a leisurely rhythm and in peace, the time to visit is never. The second best time is during the winter (avoiding the Carnaval), when the crowds thin down from the suffocating mob levels of summer and festivals. And by getting going early in the morning and avoiding guidebooks’ ‘must sees’, there are many lovely discoveries awaiting in the city’s labyrinthine alleys and dead ends. You will get lost, though. Guaranteed.

A Burmese dinner in Davis

January 19, 2024 • 8:45 am

Last night I took my host out for Burmese food, since there’s a fairly new Burmese restaurant in Davis called “My Burma“. And of course since neither of us had had Burmese food (there isn’t a single Burmese restaurant in Chicago, though there’s one in the suburbs), we had to go.

It turns out that Burmese food resembles a hybrid between Indian and southeast Asian food, with some unique items like tea leaf salad. We had a largish meal, and I’ll show it below. (The menu is here.). It’s a modest restaurant but the food is excellent. Here’s the interior:

The appetizer: Platha and coconut chicken curry dip, described as “handmade multilayered bread served with coconut chicken curry.” With a couple of good beers, this was an excellent start.  You can either dip the bread into the chicken curry or pour the curry over the bread and eat it with a fork. I oped to use my hands.

The restaurant’s most famous dish is the tea leaf salad, described as “fermented tea leaf dressing, lettuce or cabbage, peanut, fried garlic, tomato, sunflower seeds, fried yellow chickpeas, jalapenos, sesame seed, and lemon.  They bring it to the table looking like this, with the green tea leaves on top (picture from the website)

. . . and then mix it thoroughly until it looks like what’s below (I would have preferred to sample it unmixed).  Our version seemed to lack the tomatoes and jalapenos.

It was very good, with a melange of flavors, but the flavor of the tea leaves wasn’t evident, which was disappointing.

Then two main dishes, the first being chili lamb, described as “diced lamb tossed with chili sauce, garlic, onion, basil, jalapenos, and chili flakes.” The server asked us how hot we wanted it on a scale of 1 (mild) to 5 (fiery), and I said “3.2”.  It turned out to be a tasty dish but not very hot, with the scale probably ratcheted down for the American palate:

Second main: Burmese eggplant curry, described as “Burmese curry made with garlic, onion, tomato, and tender eggplant.” It was very good, and yes, the eggplant, while keeping its form, was tender and delicious, in a lovely sauce.

With it I ordered Basmati rice. Rice should really come with the meal rather than requiring a separate order, and I eat a LOT of rice with a dinner like this. Sadly, we got only a small dish that was grossly insufficient. It was good rice, but I needed a HUGE bowl of white rice to sop up all the sauce.

All in all, it’s a good restaurant, especially considering that Davis, for a college town, has a dearth of decent places to eat. If you go, see if you can get a huge portion of white rice, and eat Chinese style, putting the ingredients atop a bowl of the rice. (They don’t use chopsticks, and I guess they don’t in Burma, but I would have preferred them.)

After dinner we went to the David Food Coop, a hippie-ish grocery store that’s been going her since 1972. Like Austin, Davis is an island of Sixties-ness surrounded by a desert of agriculture, and many old hippies are still to be found shambling along the streets of town. (There are also a fair number of homeless people, something I haven’t seen here before.)

And in this cool town, heavily invested in recycling and other green efforts, the Food Coop is the epicenter. It has pretty much everything you want, from loose grains to Dr. Bronner’s soaps, although prices are high because most stuff is organic, and the coolness surely exacts a surcharge.  Here are three characteristic items.

In a place like the Food Coop, sugar is demonized. When I did my postdoc here and my parents came to visit (this was probably about 1980), I took them for brunch to a hippy-ish organic restaurant, now defunct, called the Blue Mango. My father ordered coffee with cream, and noticed that there was no sugar on the table. He asked for some. The waiter looked at him with a stinkeye and said, in all seriousness, “Sorry, we don’t have White Death. But we might be able to dig up some honey in the kitchen.” My father, an old-school Army guy, took a pass on the honey.

At the food coop, the Satanic nature of sugar is clear. All items in bins have a four-number numerical code, but it used to be just three numbers. At that time, white sugar was given the Devil’s Number: 666. Now that they have to use four numbers, they simply expanded it, keeping its Satanic qualities:

And they also had this. WTF? What was it recycled from?

One thing that’s always bothered me about the food coop, which prides itself on selling healthy and organic food, is that it also has a whole aisle of homeopathic products, which of course is pure quackery: high-priced water containing not a molecule of the “curative” substance. They should stop selling this useless stuff. Here, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, is a big scam:

But we took a pass on the fraudulent cures because we were there for dessert, and bought bean-curd-filled mochi covered with sesame seeds. They were great (no photo attached).

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 15, 2024 • 8:15 am

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior is back, taking us on a trip to Madeira. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Ilha da Madeira (Wood Island) sits some 900 km to the southwest of Portugal and 700 km west of Morocco. The island is the largest of the Madeira Archipelago, a Portuguese autonomous region. It has no beaches to speak of, but that doesn’t deter hordes of European tourists, mostly Continental Portuguese, Britons and Germans, who are lured by the island’s year-round mild climate and abundant sunshine. Inevitably, the horrors of mass-tourism are creeping in. But a judicious visitor that avoids the high season, festival days and resort hot spots near the capital Funchal, can have a memorable time – if in possession of strong legs and sturdy shoes.

Funchal is not at all a photogenic city, but it has several museums, gardens and monuments such as this homage to João Gonçalves Zarco (c. 1390-1471), winner of the Godzilla Prize for urban developer of the millennium. Prince Henrique the Navigator tasked Zarco with creating the right conditions for agriculture to encourage colonization in the hitherto uninhabited island. Zarco set to it, but faced a considerable obstacle hinted in the island’s name: a thick, luxurious forest blanketed it. But an easy solution was at hand – fire. Zarco set the island alight, and the inferno was reputed to have lasted seven years. The lowland native vegetation was wiped out, giving way to sugar cane © Vitor Oliveira, Wikimedia Commons:

A gondola lift from Funchal to the parish of Monte, a vertical climb of 560 m.:

In the 1850s, Monte residents were fed up with the long and boring slog to the city centre. So they came up with a speedier and more exciting alternative: to careen downhill in a carro de cesto (basket car), a wicker basket sledge mounted on wooden runners. Soon tourists wanted to hop on board, and today a carro de cesto journey is one of Madeira’s main attractions – Ernest Hemingway declared it to be one of the most exhilarating rides of his life. Gravity and greased runners propel the sledge forward at speeds nearing 30 km/h, while two sledge drivers negotiate crossings, moving cars, stray dogs, pedestrians and kerbs. Watch a safety-conscious Brit have a go at it:

Madeira is a piscivores’ paradise. Funchal’s fish market offers an enormous variety of seafood, some with odd shapes and appearances such as the peixe-espada preto, or black scabbardfish (Aphanopus carbo). Espada com banana is a local delicacy, but The World Health Organization recommends consuming the fish ‘in moderation’. Despite being an oceanic, deep-sea creature, the black scabbardfish is contaminated with cadmium, lead, mercury and other unsavoury ingredients. No corner of Earth is safe from human screw-ups:

While piscivores will be impressed in Madeira, frugivores will be dazzled. Thanks to the island’s generous climate and fertile volcanic soil, a range of aromatic, flavourful and exotic fruits are grown, such as guava, custard apple, pitanga, prickly pear, passion fruit, and physalis – without mentioning the run-of-the mill banana, papaya, mango, grape and avocado, among others:

Madeirans call their island the ‘floating garden of the Atlantic’. You can spend days hopping from one garden to another:

Cabo Girão: with a 580-m free fall, this the highest promontory in Europe (yes, Madeira is legally European, despite being much closer to Africa). The green carpet on the bottom is grapevines. A sphincter-tightening skywalk was installed at the edge of the chasm after this photo was taken. Madeira is small (57 x 22 km), but during most of its history of human occupation, the interior was uninhabited and uncultivated because of its unforgiving topography of mountainous gorges classed as Very Steep, Terrifying or Ohmygod. To this day, villages are confined to the few spots of gentler slopes:

You would expect cars, lorries, coaches and motorcycles to go slow in this Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner film set. You would be wrong:

Madeira has one the most impressive irrigation systems in the world. The island is intersected by some 200 levadas, which are channels cut into stone that carry water from altitudes of up to 1,800 m in the northern and central mountains to the dry, arable land in the south. The channels, 50-60 cm deep, cover more than 3,000 km, including 40 km of tunnels. Water from the levadas is strictly controlled, distributed to villages and farmers in rations that average 15 minutes every two weeks. Each of the channels’ exits has its levadeiro, a person in charge of monitoring and managing the operation. For tourists, the paths that run along the levadas are excellent avenues for exploration, and the only way to reach some parts of the island. Some levadas are easy going, others require hunchbacked trudges in dark tunnels or pacing narrow strips between the water channel and the void. Routes, maps and possible hazards can be consulted in a variety of levadas guidebooks © Jotbe1961, Wikimedia Commons:

Levadas were built mostly by hand: men often handled their picks and shovels from wicker baskets suspended from above or tied by ropes. Here a group of workers construct a levada sometime between 1947 and 1952 © Cultura Madeir:

Cultivated terraces (poios in the local dialect) seen from the Levada do Norte, which is 50-km long with 7 km of tunnels, bringing water from an altitude of 1,000 m through mountains and valleys. The Portuguese, like the Italians, are experts is putting any scrap of land into cultivation. These terraces are very good at controlling erosion; no tractors here, though:

Curral das Freiras seen from Eira do Serrado viewpoint (1,095 m). The village was originally called Curral (pen), but was changed to Curral das Freiras (nuns’ pen) – as one version of the story goes – in 1566, when Funchal was raided by French corsairs. The good sisters from a local convent suspected that a shared religion would not be sufficient to deflate the enthusiasm of French marauders in heightened stages of concupiscence, so they skedaddled to the mountains. The humble Brides of Christ knew a thing or two about the world:

The village of Casas Próximas (“nearby houses”), which are not that near – 600 m below:

Ecological field work in Madeira is not for the easily intimidated:

Back to Funchal, just in time for Carnaval. According to a native historian, the island’s festival of debauchery inspired the Brazilian version. If so, Brazilians adapted it by tackling the Madeiran revellers’ overdressing, which must be a health and safety hazard in tropical climates:

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 29, 2023 • 8:15 am

Today’s “wildlife” includes H. sapiens, and the photos come from James Blilie.  His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

This set of photos comprises portraits of people I took while traveling around the world. All of these happen to be from the round the world bicycle trip I took from 1990-1992 with one friend. I have tried to ensure that none of these have been previously submitted to you. All are scanned Kodachrome 64 or Kodacolor 100 (just one or two), with one Tri-X Pan scanned black and white negative and a scan of one very old print.

First photo:  A young man in Australia with his big cage of Galahs (Eolophus roseicapilla). We pulled over to the side of the road and probably asked him if we could fill our water bottles. He was very friendly.

 

A man at a bicycle shop in Johor Bahru, Malasyia.  Within 30 minutes after we rode over the causeway from Singapore into Malaysia, I was hit by a car turning left in front of me.  It happened so fast, I couldn’t even hit the brakes.  It ran over my front wheel.  I was lucky to be unhurt. We rode with toe clips but I did not use cleats, so I was able to eject in mid crash and land on my feet. I had no common language with this man; but I handed him the broken wheel and he knew what to do:

A man at a street stall in southern Malasia (peninsular Malaysia) making “roti”, their local version of fried flatbread.  We ate this for breakfast every day; it is delicious.  You could have it sweet, with sweetened condensed milk and sugar or savory, with lentil curry in a little bowl:

A young man in Bangkok with amazing tattoos (for that time!).  We were not staying in touristy neighborhood; and people around there were just normal folks.

Two children at the train station at Sungai Kolok Thailand.

A girl with her little brother somewhere along the road from Kathmandu to Pokhara, Nepal

A woman transplanting new rice shoots in lowland Nepal:

A Masai man in Kenya.  You could only take photos of most people in Kenya if you paid them. So we did that.  Our guide was very vigilant to make sure we weren’t sneaking photos of people – he said it could lead to a violent altercation:

A man at one of the viewing point for the pyramids at Giza, Egypt.  He was a tourist, too.  Very friendly.

A young man preparing dinner for guests at our hotel in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt.  We went to Sharm El-Sheik so that my friend could dive in the Red Sea.  I snorkeled off the beach (I was not dive-certified) and still got to see some pretty amazing fish just off the beach.

In 1992, we visited my family’s origins in Norway, at a hamlet called Blili, near Eina (between Oslo and Lillehammer) These photos are me (right) with my Norwegian cousins.  The gentleman second from the left and I share a great-great grandfather.  One of his sons emigrated to the USA in 1880 and was my great grandfather.

The second photo, from the 1870s, shows our great-great grandparents (center), my great grandfather (right), and his great grandfather (left).  This photo was taken in the same doorway in the farmhouse on the farm where my great grandfather was born and grew up.

Finally, the culprit.  A self-portrait (before selfies were a thing) on the east coast of Tasmania, 1991. My hair and beard were dark!  I had hair!

Equipment:  Pentax LX camera or Pentax K-1000 camera
Pentax M 85mm f/2.0 (my favorite portrait lens for film; I bought this in a dusty little shop in Thailand for very little)
Pentax A 50mm f/1.2 (before I got the 85mm f/2.0)
Pentax A 16mm f/2.8 fisheye (self-portrait)